The Balloons of Oaxaca

By Barry Head and Noel Chilton

Set in the south of Mexico, this is the realistic, colorful story of one childs rough road into the modern world.

From what hes heard, Utuyu, about six years old, thinks the city of Oaxaca sounds like a marvelous place. It looks different, though, when he finds himself there all alone, hungry and homeless, nearly run over by the traffic, not knowing how money works or where to get any, and even unable to speak the language of the people around him. Theres a lot Utuyu has to learn--and fast!--if he is to survive.

Utuyus adventures make a tale of determination, courage and resourcefulness as he learns to cope with feelings all children share.

Charmingly illustrated, The Balloons of Oaxaca makes perfect bedtime reading in the old tradition. Its readable to five-year-olds and readable by ten-year-olds themselves.

BARRY HEAD is a painter and writer, spending most of the year in Oaxaca, Mexico. We invite you to visit barryhead.com and
barryheadwriter.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 11, 2006
• ISBN: 9781469120744

Barry Head

BARRY HEAD is a painter and writer, spending most of the year in Oaxaca, Mexico. We invite you to visit barryhead.com and barryheadwriter.com.

Book preview

Copyright © 2006 by Barry Head.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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35398

For

Adrian

And in loving memory of

Fred Rogers

Guide, Philosopher and Friend

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

About the Illustrator

Chapter One

In the city of Oaxaca, in a country called Mexico, there lives a boy whose name is Utuyu.

Those are strange names, aren’t they? They’re easy names to say, though, and I’ll tell you how to say them. You say Oaxaca the way you’d say Wa-HA-ka, with the HA a little louder than the rest. Wa-HA-ka. If you try saying it, you’ll find it’s not so hard. It looks strange when you write it out on paper, because it comes from an old language that is very different from yours and mine.

You say Mexico like you’d say MEK-si-co. You may already know how to say that one. As for the boy’s name, it comes from another old language, and you say it the way you’d say Oo-too-YOO, with the YOO a little louder than the rest. In the old language of Utuyu’s people, his name means sky.

At the time of this story, Utuyu is about six years old. I say about six years old, because Utuyu didn’t know exactly how old he was. Neither did anyone else. His mother and father might have known how old Utuyu was, but nobody knew where his mother and father were.

Many different people looked after Utuyu before he was able to look after himself, but none of those people had room to look after him for very long. Even if they’d had enough room for him, they wouldn’t have had enough food to keep feeding him for very long. They had to feed themselves, and they had many children of their own to feed as well. That’s why, when Utuyu was about six years old, there came a day when no one would look after him anymore.

The last person who looked after Utuyu was a woman named Ita, which you say the way you’d say EE-ta, with the EE a little louder than the rest. Ita had seven other children of her own to look after. Except for Ita’s little baby, all the children slept together on thin, grass mats on the hard, dirt floor of one of the two small rooms in Ita’s house. The house was up in a valley in what are called The Mountains to the North. The Mountains to the North rise above the city of Oaxaca, and you can see them from a long way away.

For most of the year, the sun was hot in the mountains, and the house was warm, but there was a time in the winter months when the nights became cold. Then, all the children, except the baby, slept in a bundle in the middle of the floor, keeping each other warm. The baby slept close to her mother, and that’s how the two of them kept warm. In the hot weather, the children slept around the edges of the room, against the walls. Utuyu didn’t mind sleeping either way—in the middle of the room in a bundle, or around the edges against the walls. What he liked was sleeping with a lot of other people around him, hearing them breathing, and murmuring, and snoring whenever he happened to wake up in the middle of the night.

Some nights, there were more children sleeping in the room than on other nights. This was because Ita’s children often walked down the mountain to the city of Oaxaca. The city was much too far away for them to come back to sleep in Ita’s house the same night. They would start out when the sun went down, and if they walked all the way, the sun would be high overhead the next day by the time they got to the city. Walking home again took the children longer, because they had to walk up the mountain instead of down, and of course they walked more slowly going uphill. They also usually brought things back from the city, and carrying their packages and bags slowed them down, too.

When Utuyu first came to Ita’s house, only her four oldest children went to the city. As time went by, though, all Ita’s children—except the baby, of course—were old enough to go. Usually, they would be away from the house for many days and nights, so Utuyu was often at the house alone with Ita and her baby. Whenever Ita’s children came back to the house from the city, she greeted them the same way. Everyone safe and sound? she’d say.

The children always came back from the city with new stories. Utuyu wanted to know everything about what they’d been doing while they were away. He liked hearing again and again about their long, slow walk, about the birds and animals they’d seen, about the fruits they’d found to eat along the way, and about the other grownups and other children who were walking to the city as well. Somewhere along the road, Ita’s children told him, there was a pool in the river where everyone stopped for a while. The grownups would sit in the shade of the trees, talking and eating, while the children splashed in the water to cool off. Then everyone would move on again down the mountains toward the city.

Ita’s children didn’t always have to walk all the way to the city and back. They told Utuyu how, if they were lucky, the driver of an old truck would stop and let them get in the back. When that happened on the way to the city, they said, they would sit in the back and shout as loud as they could as the truck turned and twisted down the mountain, around the sharp, steep curves. They’d bang on the little window behind the driver, and the driver knew their banging meant they wanted him to make the truck go faster—and he would. When he did, and brought the truck around another steep curve, they’d all shout louder still.

It was hard for Utuyu to imagine what it was like in the city of Oaxaca. From the children’s stories, it sounded like the whole place was full of cars and trucks and people almost all the time, day and night. They said there was music everywhere, and food of more different kinds than you could name. They said it was noisy, with loud church bells and things called fireworks that suddenly went off with a BANG! and made you jump when they exploded in colors above your head.

Once, Ita’s children brought back three balloons on strings—a bright, yellow one with a face on it, a bright, red one with some words on it, and a shiny, silver one in the shape of a dog. The children said there were lots and lots of people selling balloons in the central square of the city, holding onto enormous bunches of them. The bunches were so big you couldn’t see the person holding them anymore. One thing Utuyu learned about the three balloons the children brought back to Ita’s house was that if you let go of the string, the balloon on the other end would fly away into the sky. That’s what happened when he was playing with the red one and let go of the string by mistake. Up and away it went, until it got so small in the blue sky that he couldn’t see it anymore, and it never came back. The yellow one and the one in the shape of a dog stayed up against the ceiling of Ita’s house for a long time, but then they seemed to get tired of staying there and slowly came down to the ground. After that, the balloons didn’t try to fly away anymore.

The children brought something else back from the city whenever they returned—pocketsful of coins, which they gave to Ita. Ita let Utuyu play with the coins, and that’s how he learned their names and how to count all the way to 50.

Utuyu wanted to go to the city with all the others. He wanted to see it for himself, to see if the stories the children were telling him were really true. If they were true, then the walk to the city had to be truly wonderful. Certainly life in Oaxaca itself, once you got there, sounded better than carrying heavy buckets of water from the river, one at a time. It sounded better than gathering armfuls of prickly wood for the fire. It certainly sounded a whole lot better to Utuyu than sitting still for hours, mashing corn with a stone until his arms ached so much that he thought they were about to fall off—but of course arms can’t do that, can they?

When there was no work to do, which wasn’t very often, Utuyu had a favorite place he’d go to where he could be by himself. No one else ever seemed to go there. It was a place where rocks had fallen into a pile, and if you turned over the right rocks, you’d always find scorpions there. Utuyu knew that scorpions could sting you and make you sick, but that only happened if you got too close to them, which Utuyu never did. He liked the way the scorpions looked—black and shiny, with their sharp tails curled over their backs. He liked touching one with a stick and seeing it try to sting the wood.

You silly scorpion! Utuyu would say. Sticks can’t feel your sting!

At times, Utuyu imagined a scorpion was answering him. Once, one of them seemed to say, You are the silly one. We sting whatever there is to sting. Doing our stinging feels good.

When Utuyu pushed two of the scorpions together, they tried to sting each other.

That’s really stupid of you, Utuyu told them. Now look what you’ve done!

We sting, one of the scorpions seemed to say. That’s what we do. What you do is up to you. You’ll find out.

The times Utuyu liked best at Ita’s house were when all her children were there, and something would happen to make people from all over the place come and visit. They didn’t come only for a little while and then go away again. They’d come bringing bags and bundles, and they’d stay and stay and stay. At nights, they all seemed to be in a good mood, and they’d dance and tell stories and sing.

It was the singing part of these times that Utuyu liked the most of all. When he was alone with Ita and her baby, when all her other children had gone to the city, Ita would teach him songs that she said their people had been singing for longer than anyone could remember. Utuyu found the songs easy to learn. When he and Ita would sing them together, she’d clap her hands and shake her head.

None of my children learned songs as fast as you do, she told Utuyu one day when they were singing. And none of them has as sweet a voice as you have.

That, of course, made Utuyu feel good. Whenever the people came from all over to stay, Ita would ask Utuyu to sing to them. When he did, everyone clapped their hands and shook their heads.

Chapter Two

For a long time, Ita told Utuyu he was too young to go to the city with the others. He didn’t argue about it, because he learned, as soon as he moved into Ita’s house, that nobody argued with Ita about anything. You did what she told you to do, and you did it when she told you to do it. So, when one day Ita finally told Utuyu that it was time for him to leave the house and go to the city, he didn’t argue about that, either. In fact, Utuyu didn’t want to argue about it, even though Ita told him he was to go to city for good. She didn’ t say that he could never come back again, but she did say that she wasn’t going to look after him anymore, and that he was going to have to start looking after himself. That was fine by Utuyu. He felt quite sure that he didn’t need anyone to look after him, and now, at last, he was going to get to see the city of Oaxaca for himself. He’d find out whether all the things Ita’s children had been telling him were true.

The next time Ita’s children went down the mountain, Utuyu went with them. It was getting dark when they got ready to leave the house. Ita gave Utuyu a package of the flat bread she was always making, the bread she made from the corn he had helped mash. The bread was all he took with him, except for the shirt and shorts and sandals he was wearing. He thanked Ita for the bread and said goodbye. He didn’t see Ita standing in the doorway, her hands on her hips, shaking her head slowly from side to side as she watched him go. Utuyu didn’t see her, not because it was dark, but because he didn’t look back.

They walked and walked. At least the other children walked, but Utuyu often had to run to keep up with them. His legs were much shorter than theirs, so he had to make his go faster.

To their left, the sky became purple instead of black.

Is it still a long way to Oaxaca? Utuyu asked.

Yes, said the children. A long way.

They went on walking. The sky became dark blue.

Are we almost there? Utuyu asked.

No, said the children.

They went on walking. The sky became a lighter blue.

Are we ever going to get to Oaxaca? Utuyu asked.

Yes, said the children.

They went on walking. The sky became yellow.

Now are we almost there? Utuyu asked.

No, said the children.

The sun came up over the mountains, and still they walked. The day became hot. Utuyu’s legs were tired, and he was already hungry and thirsty.

I want to stop for a while, Utuyu said. Okay?

Yes, said the children.

Will you wait for me? Utuyu asked.

No, said the children. You can catch up with us at the pool in the river.

Utuyu sat down beside the path. The other children went on, leaving him alone as they disappeared from sight around the next turn. He unwrapped the package of bread and tried to eat a piece, but his mouth was too dry to swallow it. He needed something to drink. Looking around, he saw a line of dark green plants a little distance away, and he recognized them as the same kind of plants that grew beside the river where he went to get pails of water for Ita.

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